Young people (and, sadly, too many adults who’ve never matured) say and do a lot of foolhardy things on the Internet that are likely to haunt them in one aspect of life or another some day. How will they ever escape the online mistakes of their youth?

Here’s an interesting and entirely plausible thought from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. “I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds.

But trying to hide your past could be more problematic than having it exposed. Just because an embarrassing picture, video or statement isn’t attached to a name doesn’t mean it never happened.

If someone remembers a face but can’t place a name with it, he may try to connect the online dots. And if he succeeds, a mere embarrassing moment could be exposed as an attempted cover-up. Public figures especially would be susceptible to such revelations, but they could impact anyone.

The better course of action is to monitor and limit young people’s access to social networks and to teach them how to behave online in the first place.